Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to the field of mirrors for use with electronic mobile devices. More particularly, the present invention pertains to a mirror for smartphones, tablets, MP3 players, and other mobile devices having a viewing screen.
Background Art
Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile, wireless devices with a glass viewing screen are found in all almost every pocket and purse in the United States, and the popularity of these devices is due to their wide range of functionality. Mobile devices today are both a source of entertainment, such as listening to music or watching a movie, and an all-in-one tool, providing the user turn by turn driving directions, calendar reminders for piano lessons, and portable camera for an impromptu shot at a friend's house. In particular, smartphones are particularly useful due to the vast array of “apps”—short software programs—that can be downloaded for free or for fee from the internet that add functional features to the smartphone. Apps hence allow us to consolidate the myriad gadgets we use every day into a single device.
Women in particular benefit from multi-functional mobile devices because they tend to have more small items to carry around. For instance, virtually every adult woman's purse contains a tube of lipstick, but not every woman has room in her purse for a mirror. Women are always looking for mirrors, and mirror-like objects for makeup application or hair checking during the day, and it is not always convenient to carry a mirror, because the mirror has to be of a certain size in order to be useful. Cosmetic purveyors have tried to fix this problem by applying mirrors to lipstick tubes, or with small mirrored compacts, etc. but these mirrors are irritatingly small, and they do not solve the second problem that goes hand in hand with a mirror: the need for good lighting. Any mirror, large or small in bad lighting is almost as bad as having no mirror at all. Bathrooms in restaurants and hotels are notoriously dark and ill-lit, rendering makeup touch-up or application impossible. Manhattan, for instance, is famous for its dimly lit restaurants, and its fashionable bathrooms are so dark it is hard to see any detail about one's face or clothing, forget about touch up one's eyeliner or blend concealer on a blemish. In particular, the rise of the “selfie”—the spur of the moment camera shot of the smartphone's user by the user him or herself—and the selfie's penchant for creating unflattering headshots, has made the lack of mirrors even more annoying.
The industry has responded with software applications that use the selfie camera as a makeshift mirror, but these apps are not true mirrors and simply record the viewer's image, then replay the image back to the viewer. Despite continuing innovations in recorded image technology, there is a time delay between capturing and playing the recorded image, and this delay makes application of makeup difficult because the visual information being displayed is slower than the actual physical act being performed in real time, and as such, performing precision acts, like applying mascara, is tortuous due to the camera's time delay. The viewer's hand is not doing what the viewer's eyes see at the same time. Further, the poor lighting problem is not solved by the selfie camera, which cannot augment the lighting around the viewer's face sufficiently to allow task work to be done with confidence.
Cameras and other capture/playback technology thus are so far poor substitutes for true mirrors. The term “true mirror” here means a mirror that reflects back to the viewer a specular reflection without image distortion. There are two basic types of true mirrors: conventional and two-way.
Conventional mirrors, are made of glass or some other smooth, rigid optically transparent material having a reflective coating adhered to the backside of the glass or other optically transparent material. When light hits the mirror, it can neither pass through the reflective coating nor be absorbed by it, and thus must be reflected. The shiny backing does not scatter light to create a diffuse reflection but rather light contacting the smooth surface creates a specular reflection, and a resulting image seen in the mirrored surface is a “light print”, a reversing of “front and back” of the image in the mirrored surface versus the real image. The light is reflected because the mirror is electrically conductive: since light is an electromagnetic field, when it contacts the mirror the metal coating cancels out the electric field parallel to the mirror, causing the light to change direction and reflect away.
Two-way mirrors function slightly differently from conventional mirrors. A light-porous yet reflective surface is applied to the front side of an optically transparent medium, such as glass. The two-way mirror is then positioned so as to be able to separately control the amount of light on the front side of the mirror as well as on the back side. For the front side to serve as a mirror, lighting on this side must be relatively brighter than lighting on the back side. When the two-way mirror is a window in a wall separating two rooms, the front room has the reflective side of the mirror, and a back room has the back side of the mirror. The back room must be darker and the front room brighter in order for the reflective side to serve as a mirror and for people in the back room to be able to see through the mirror and view on goings in the front room. If the back room has more light than the front room, the light from the back room is transmitted to the front room through the porous reflective surface and thus visually cancels out the reflective light from the front of the mirror. When the back room is dark, only the reflected light is seen by the viewer in the front room, hence a mirror effect is created. It should be noted that unless the front room is very brightly lit, the mirror image created is visually darker than that created by a conventional mirror. While not perfect, the two-way mirror still provides a specular reflection that shows movements, etc. in real time far superior to any recording/playback images now available, but cannot augment ambient light.
What is needed is a true mirror for a mobile device, where the viewing screen or another portion of the smartphone is adapted for use as a true mirror which reflects the viewer's image in real time, and which can also be illuminated so as to improve the user's ability to see his or her image in the viewing screen.